A typical household may have four, five, or more, television viewing areas and/or rooms, many of which consumers expect to have television content provided by a cable company or similar television content provider. In an IP-based television (IPTV) system, the bandwidth available to deliver data streams to a household can restrict the number of television devices that can receive television content at any one time. For example, a household may have six televisions, only four of which can display live television for viewing at any one time.
For an IPTV system, a television-based client device does not include a physical tuner like a conventional television set-top box, for example. Rather there is a limited amount of bandwidth allocated for a viewing system, such as a household, over which all of the media content data is provided for the viewing system. Additionally, different stream formats require more bandwidth than others for delivery of the data streams. For example, standard definition data streams do not require as much bandwidth as high definition data streams. This allows more standard definition programs to be viewed at any one time than high definition programs in a multi-television environment. However this creates more complex viewing situations and conflicts for a viewing system. Multiple solutions to the conflicts are possible based on time and bandwidth conflicts between the various data streams and viewer requested actions, such as a request to view live television, a video on-demand, an audio channel, and the like via a data stream.